How to configure Loki correctly?

Hello.

I’ve been trying to replicate some reports about my website, that I have in Kibana, using Loki and Grafana.

I already have some logs in Loki and created some queries to show things like QPS, number of registered users vs non registered users, demographics stats, number of requests per page and others.

My problem is, that Loki becomes very slow showing this data, after just a couple hundred thousand log lines. In Kibana and elastic search, they’re shown instantly.

A couple questions coming from this:

• I guess I can use recording rules to calculate metrics and show results from those instead of querying the actual log data. Is this the way or there is another option?

• later on, if I want to add more information on the dashboard, probably involving a new recording rules to calculate, how can I have it calculate past results, not only future ones?